sun

A nine-minute science-fiction short whose script was written entirely by a recurrent neural network trained on old screenplays and titled by it too. Directed by Oscar Sharp, starring Thomas Middleditch, it was mostly non-sequiturs, one man vomiting an eyeball and a plausible sad song. Ars Technica's premiere made it the first AI-written film most people had heard of.

Google's chief executive, who called the company 'AI-first' in 2016, was reported to have declared a 'code red' when ChatGPT arrived in December 2022, presided over a February 2023 Bard demo that got a fact about a telescope wrong and cost a reported $100bn in market value in a day, and then rebuilt the company's AI effort around Gemini. The internet counted how often he said 'AI' at I/O and he began counting too.

The major labels' suits against the two music generators, filed in June 2024, alleging mass copying of recordings and seeking up to 150,000 dollars per work, with prompts that produced songs resembling Mariah Carey and Chuck Berry. Both companies admitted training on copyrighted music and claimed fair use. UMG settled with Udio in October 2025 and Warner with both in November 2025. The case that became a partnership.

A rap about cupcakes and Narnia that made YouTube a household name over a single Christmas. NBC had it taken down in February 2006, having noticed the audience but not the lesson.

A band with a million monthly listeners, a back catalogue, band photos, and no members. Exposed in July 2025 as generated end to end. The first AI act to chart, and the first to be found out.

The weekend ritual of cleaning the flat, meal-prepping, changing the sheets and planning the week, filmed — the Sunday reset — a genre of 2021 onwards in which domestic labour became content with a colour palette. The record's entry for the reset that requires a camera.

A character type — hostile ('tsun tsun') on the outside, warm ('dere dere') underneath — coined on Japanese forums around 2002 and now used by the English internet for any person, cat or customer-service bot that is rude before it is kind. The record's entry for the archetype, and for the phrase 'it's not like I wrote this entry for you or anything'.

A knight raising his arms to the sun — 'praise the sun!' — from Dark Souls, as the gesture and phrase for any small triumph or any actual sunny day, and the record's entry for the most cheerful thing to come out of the least cheerful game.